The City of Masks — Inside the Classic

Telephone Etiquette as Social Performance

The opening chapter establishes a world where even a phone call is a staged event. The Marchioness, despite being at home in an apron, prepares herself as if for a face-to-face visit: tucking stray locks of hair, seating herself at a little old Italian table. She treats the telephone as a medium of full presence, not absence. When Lord Eric Temple, calling himself Tom Trotter, asks to bring a friend from Constantinople, she responds with theatrical alarm—'I always do. One can't help thinking of the Armenians. Eh? Oh, yes,—and the harems'—before readily agreeing. The humor lies in the gap between her grand manner and her actual circumstances: she is a marchioness dusting her own andirons, yet she performs aristocratic nonchalance for a servant and an invisible caller. This tension between title and reality, between performed identity and lived condition, runs through the excerpts.

The Fog as a Stage Device

Fog appears repeatedly in the excerpts, not as mere atmosphere but as a narrative tool that obscures and reveals. When Jane Emsdale is dismissed from her post as governess, she steps out into 'the foggy March night' where 'a fine mist blew upon her hot face.' The footman Peasley remarks, 'A bit thick, ain't it? Reminds one of London.' The fog blurs boundaries: it turns street lamps into 'huge, circular vignettes in the white mist' and makes taxi-cabs loom 'vaguely through the screen of fog.' Characters use it to hide or to stage encounters—the 'irrepressible and somewhat jubilant scion of the house' accosts Jane at the bottom of the steps, his hat pulled down and collar up. The fog functions as a literal mask, allowing characters to approach one another with a semblance of anonymity, much like the telephone allows the Marchioness to perform for an unseen audience.

Servants and the Performance of Class

The excerpts repeatedly show servants as active participants in the social drama, not passive background. Julia the parlour-maid identifies Lord Temple by his self-introduction as Tom Trotter—'and so I knew it couldn't be any one else but his Lordship'—demonstrating that servants decode the class signals their employers send. Peasley the footman helps Jane with her luggage and even comments on the fog, aligning himself with her as a fellow Londoner. Most strikingly, when Mrs. Smith-Parvis dismisses Jane, the narrative focuses on Jane's 'eloquent back' as she turns away, a gesture Mrs. Smith-Parvis finds 'positively insulting.' The conflict is not just about employment but about the right to perform dignity: Jane's back speaks louder than any words. The catalog subject 'Aristocracy (Social class) — Fiction' is thus enacted through small, physical rebellions and the complicity of servants who understand the rules of the game better than their masters.

Readers should attend to the novel's use of stage directions—the way characters position themselves, the objects they handle, the weather they move through. The excerpts offer no complete plot, but they suggest a story built on misdirection and self-invention, where a telephone call can be a performance and a foggy street can be a stage. The catalog subjects hint at a transatlantic tale, but the evidence points to a more intimate comedy of manners, one where the masks are not literal but social.

There’s something about McCutcheon’s world—the careful staging of every entrance, the way a phone call becomes a performance—that quietly stayed with me. It reminded me, oddly, of that older German tale, where displacement turns strangers into actors in each other’s lives. The wanderings and fortunes of some German emigrants — Context and Discussion carries that same gentle ache, the sense of people holding themselves together with nothing but manners and hope.